"Unknown" served as the collective byline for The Weekly Standard's unsigned editorial content and miscellaneous short items throughout the magazine's entire run from 1995 to 2018. With over 1,100 entries, these pieces typically comprised the magazine's "Scrapbook" section and other recurring features that gathered brief commentary on politics, culture, and media into wide-ranging roundups. The format covered everything from foreign policy and electoral politics to pop culture oddities and academic absurdities.
The late senator rejects tribalism and reminds Americans that 'we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement.'
On January 12 the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s attorney, paid a pornographic actress with the nom de scène of Stormy Daniels the sum of $130,000 in exchange for her signature on a nondisclosure agreement. The thing she was not to disclose was an “alleged sexual…
Eight months into its current session, Congress has passed no major legislation.
Former national security adviser Rice reportedly continued getting classified information.
Editor's Note: The e-mail was drawn from the excellent work of Sid Stafford. You can read his original here.
The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the…
The Associated Press reports:
Image
James Salter died last month at age 90. His death took place in a gymnasium not far from his home in Sag Harbor, New York. There was something fitting about this. As a West Point graduate, he was always very physically fit. The obituaries were fulsome. He was spoken of as a “writers’ writer.” This…
“Moammar Qaddafi and his regime need to recognize that their rule has come to an end. Qaddafi needs to acknowledge the reality that he no longer controls Libya. He needs to relinquish power once and for all.”
At a fundraiser in New York, President Barack Obama compared himself to Andrew Cuomo and Martin Luther King Jr. "I think that we forget when [King] was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. But what he understood,…
As I tap this out on my computer, there resides in my yellow wooden inbox a sleeping three-month-old female Calico kitten named Hermione. I acquired her this past Friday evening, and spent the better part of the weekend in her company. Jolly company it was, too, all fun and games. In the most…
"Georgia faces a stark choice between two mutually exclusive futures." That's how the Center for American Progress kicked off a 70+ page report on the divided former Soviet republic. That sophomoric dichtomy is fair enough way to launch the study - an inaccurate assertion is the opening salvo in a…
Liberals could not prove their argument that the Tucson shootings were caused by the violent words of conservatives. Liberals then changed their argument: The Tucson shootings were caused by the violent possessions of conservatives. That is, the shootings were caused by private ownership of…
This afternoon, Donald Rumsfeld hosted a handful of bloggers and new media wonks for a lunch discussion. Though purpose of the visit was to discuss Rumsfeld memoirs, Known and Unknown, he had no trouble diving into current events. When asked about the defense budget debate -a hot topic in Congress…
Earlier today, staffers on the House Budget Committee -Paul Ryan's shop- unveiled their plan to trim the federal budget. The big question was whether the defense budget, already the subject of self-inflicted cuts by the Obama administration, would take another hit.
In the midst of all the unrest in Egypt, much hash has been made about supporting autocratic regimes. There are times, of course, when pragmatic realpolitik is necessary. Discerning the lesser of two evils, such as propping up Mubarak to avoid Israeli-Egyptian conflict or a fundamentalist Cairo…
Iran's military meddling in the fledgling nation of Iraq is common knowledge, as is their frequent -though ineffective- electoral tampering. A key instrument of Tehran's propaganda machine is manipulation of Iraqi and wider Arab media, vehicles for Iran to slander Iraqi politicians who reject the…
In the discussion of the relationship between ratification of the new START treaty and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget for maintaining our nuclear weapons stockpile, an oft heard war cry in favor of ratification is that the Obama Administration’s budget is one that former NNSA…
The news this week from Iran reports that Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43 year-old widow and mother of two boys, will not be stoned to death for the crime of adultery. But before anyone rejoices in the Iranian regime making a concession to a modern value system that doesn’t punish innocent,…
Just received from ISAF's public affairs shop:
In his May 31, 2010, cover article titled “No Museum Left Behind,” Lance Esplund paints a detailed and idealized picture of the Barnes Foundation and adopts wholesale some of the common misconceptions about the upcoming move of the foundation’s collection to Philadelphia and the reasons for it.…
Ploughshares Chief Joe Cirincione, on the swell of conservative concern over START and the Nuclear Posture Review:
At the New York Times, A. G. Sulzberger is portraying Ahmad Wais Afzali, the imam to Najibullah Zazi, as an unknowing accomplice to Zazi's plot to carry out suicide attacks on New York City's subways:
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday about the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, demanding that Israel take immediate steps to show it is interested in renewing efforts to achieve a Middle East peace agreement.
One of the big payoffs from the much touted (yet deeply underwhelming) "reset" of relations with Moscow was sustainment of the northern distribution network, a logistical lifeline to Afghanistan which cuts a hot path through several former Soviet republics. This was to be step one in…
One of the big payoffs from the much touted (yet deeply underwhelming) "reset" of relations with Moscow was sustainment of the northern distribution network, a logistical lifeline to Afghanistan which cuts a hot path through several former Soviet republics. This was to be step one in…
The Byran York of the Washington Examiner reports that even her fellow democrats are turning against Martha Coakley. As things keep looking better for Scott Brown, democrats are distancing themselves from Coakley, blaming not only her “inept campaign,” but also her aloof personality and poor…
The Massachusetts Senate special election is shaping up as a referendum on the health-care debate in Washington. And its outcome may well determine whether Massachusetts seniors get to keep the Medicare benefits they currently enjoy.
David A. Kessler is a man of science--former dean of the medical school at Yale and a physician himself--but he is also a man of pudge, so not long ago he decided to combine the two interests in an experiment.
This is stolen & from a current article on The Weekly Standand site.
A PHILOSOPHIC ASIDE
D.C. EDUCATION PROPOSAL
What Jack Kemp Accomplished
CRIME AND POLICE
NET-ZERO GAS TAX
WE ARE ALL DETROITERS
ANTI-SEMITISM IN IRAN
Courage, Aristotle says somewhere, is the first of the virtues, because courage makes the other virtues possible. Our friend and colleague Dean Barnett was brave. He was brave to a degree that perhaps only his beloved wife, Kirstan, and others in his immediate family were able to appreciate.
CAR SEAT REGULATION
BORKING BLAME
CLIMATE COMPLEXITY
CAMPAIGN FINANCE CRIME
A NATION OF WHINERS?
CHALLENGING GORE
OBAMA'S NEIGHBORS
RICE'S LEADERSHIP
NIXON'S A.G. REDUX
AGENBITES AGAIN
MCCAIN'S VIRTUE
In February, many commentators lauded the elections in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)--in which the region's religious parties were swept out of power in favor of secular-minded parties--as a major victory in the war on terror. Others warned at the time that the significance of the…
STUDY THE TRIBES
WE THANK THE WEEKLY STANDARD for reminding its readers of the criticisms we made of the Bush administration's linkage of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda ("Not What They Supposed," April 14). It would have been nice if Stephen F. Hayes--in his indefatigable quest to prove that connection--hadn't…
BALKAN BRAWL
IN CELEBRATING City Journal editor Sol Stern's school-choice "apostasy" ("Schoolyard Brawl," March 17), Daniel Casse dismisses as "doctrinaire" several pro-choice responses to Stern, suggesting that neither reason nor evidence informs them. It is in fact Stern and Casse, however, who are unwilling…
BORDER INSECURITY
LETTERS OF STATE
JENA REVISED
WISDOM OF THE WARRIORS
Debate Awards
AN APOLOGY
Editor's Note: On December 28, General David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force Iraq, sent the following letter to his troops.
DON'T RIDICULE ROMNEY
TERRORISTS AT SEA
SAVING ANTIOCH COLLEGE
GIULIANI ON ABORTION
UNIVERSITY DIVERSITY
HILLARYCARE 2.0
NOT SO FUN
MALIGNING MORMONS
FOOD FIGHT
THE KGB IN COPENHAGEN
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor.
THE BRAVE BOOMERS
ALASKA'S SWEETHEART
SILVER SCREEN STALINISTS
FIGHT FOR READING FIRST
LIBERTY IN HONG KONG
SACRED SOIL
WIDE WORLD OF VIOLENCE
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity.
SEND THEM PACKING
Senator Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) today addressed the Iraq withdrawal provision in the supplemental appropriations bill on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
GALLING GALLAUDET
THE GREAT WALL
WARM BARTH
CROSS WITH W&M
THINK OF THE CHILDREN
A CIVILIZED PASTIME
KNOWING HE IS SOMEONE who has embedded previously in Iraq, I found Michael Fumento's understanding of the embed process somewhat lacking and simplistic. ("Why I'm Not Embedded In Iraq," 3/2/2007) Of all people, he should sympathize with the importance of being realistic and flexible in his…
MEET THE LOONEYS
DEFENDING DURHAMITES
JUDGING DRUGS
EDITORIAL NOTE: Around the time I was starting Encounter Books in 1997, I mentioned to my friend Jim Denton that I thought a memoir by Jeane Kirkpatrick would be an important book. Jim knew Jeane, and he brought the two of us together at a New York restaurant to talk about it.
COLD WAR WARS
TEENAGE WASTELAND
RADIOS FOR FREEDOM
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard (Doubleday, 432 pp., $26). The Theodore Roosevelt history remembers is the effervescent, tough-talking warrior who never walked away from a struggle, regardless of circumstances. While this is an accurate portrayal of TR,…
MERCIFUL MERCENARIES
A NOTE FROM FALLUJA
SANDRA D. OR SNOOP D.?
AL QAEDA'S VIETNAM?
REPORTING ON FAITH
DEFENDING THE DoD
THAT DAME PLAME
ANOTHER SIDE OF DYLAN
BIBLES 'PLACED BY FDR'
WATCHING HUMAN RIGHTS
The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 192 pp., $23.95). Thanks to Laura Kipnis, I overcame my addiction to chocolate, cancelled my weekly psychiatric appointment, and no longer get anxious when my boyfriend doesn't call.
GO TRIBE
RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION
BUGS: NO SCWEWY WABBIT
Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine by Candice E. Jackson (World Ahead, 304 pp., $25.95). Since 1992, books about President Clinton have become a cottage industry in conservative circles; there is scarcely enough room on the shelf for another title about the philanderer. Despite…
GREAT BALLS OF FIRE
Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts by Mark W. Smith (Crown Forum, 272 pp., $25.95). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once infamously wrote in a Supreme Court decision that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." In Mark W. Smith's new book Disrobed:…
Eating dinner at a modest restaurant a block from our house the other night, we had a minor Washington moment. Leaning over toward me and indicating two men at a nearby table, my husband said quietly, "Who do you suppose that is with Lindsey Graham?"
YOGA: NOT JUST FOR YUPS
The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent edited by James Panero and Stefan Beck (ISI Books, 400 pp., $25.00). On June 7, 1980, an ambitious group of Dartmouth students printed the first issue of a publication that would change the school forever. In the spirit of William F. Buckley Jr. and National…
SPARRING OVER SERBIA
Without Roots by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera (Basic Books, 159 pp., $22.00). In a Socratic exchange of letters, the then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Italian senate president Marcello Pera propose that Europeans are loitering through history without a compass. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict…
NAY TO NATO
PRIMARY BATTLES
Brothers in Arms
MAY WE RECOMMEND . . .
Bomber Blessings
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Man and Wives
Ah, Mad Ahmadinejad
Editor's Note: In 1969, Harvard University kicked the ROTC program off campus, forcing Harvard students who wanted to participate in it to do so through MIT's Army, Air Force, and Navy/Marine Corps ROTC units.
Not Always So Blunt
Boston Comments
Wang Sounds the Gong
Cartoon Goes South?
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Mulling over Mullahs
Judicial Foreign Affairs
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Bordering on a Brawl
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Fight over Gunfight
I Spy a Terrorist
BOOKS IN BRIEF
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Sharia-Free Zone
Be-Weare of EmDo
Dems Shun GOP Greens
Executing Laws
Piano-Playing Butcher?
Concerning Cyprus
Books in Brief
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
A Spin on Torture
Torture a Tonic?
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Incoherent Dems
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Return Fire
Books in Brief
Join the Club?
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Not Entirely Baroque
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Debating Iraq's Future
BOOKS IN BRIEF
BOOKS IN BRIEF
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Academic Disputations
English Translation of Ayman al-Zawahiri's letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
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BOOKS IN BRIEF
The U.S. State Department's latest report on Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments is worth a read.
Guess who delivered this speech? President Abbas must be held accountable for any and all actions that take place under his leadership. The disengagement has shown a bright spotlight on the Palestinian people and their leadership. The excuses have had to end. They now have responsibility for Gaza.…
Prime Minister Blair on why Britain stands alongside America in the war on terror: I never doubted after September 11th that our place was alongside America and I don't doubt it now. And for a very simple reason. Terrorism struck most dramatically in New York but it was aimed then, and is aimed…
Sakharov and the Gipper
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia by Robert E. Herzstein (Cambridge University Press, 368 pp., $32) Robert Herzstein has written a powerful attack on the "Luce network," as he refers to the handful of publications (most notably Time) that Henry Luce owned and edited for having…
Rumsfeld v. Kristol
Books in Brief
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I'm Free, Freelancing
BOOKS IN Brief
Mommy Markets
BOOKS IN BRIEF
War Against Islamists?
Books in Brief
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Rare Rationality
Open Doors?
Books in Brief
Books in Brief
Books in Brief
Books in Brief
Ripping on Galloway
Books in Brief
Estate Planning
Books in Brief
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Filibuster, Be Gone!
Books in Brief
Benedict's Challenge
Books in Brief
Isolation Ward
Books in Brief
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Great Moments in Acknowledgments
Papal Legacy
PRAs are A-Okay
Books in Brief
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Books in Brief
Canada-Palooza!
The Citizen-Farmer
Books in Brief
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class by Ross Gregory Douthat (Hyperion, 288 pp., $24.95) You've finished Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, and you want more. More alcohol-soaked frat parties, more college boys and girls "hooking up," more about America's co-eds stretching…
Stockholm Syndrome
BOOKS IN BRIEF
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Sizing up the Sufis
Books in Brief
DISRAELI'S CONSERVATISM
Books In Brief
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Europe's Wake-Up Call
Books in Brief
p>THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state. *1* I JUST WANTED to thank Tom Donnelly for taking the time to think about and comment on my ideas. We clearly disagree about what the present and…
The Other "CIA"
Pension Panic
Books in Brief
Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:
The Israel Factor
THERE IS A NEW YEAR'S story (it may even be true) about Merriman Smith, one of the great White House correspondents of mid-century. As a young reporter freshly arrived from Georgia in the 1930s, Smith was told to man the Washington desk on New Year's Day, while his more senior colleagues nursed…
IN DEFENSE of Rummy
Books in Brief
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No Free Lunch
Books in Brief
A Grateful Marine
Books in Brief
Back to Arkansas . . .
Books in Brief
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Guns and Butter
Books in Brief
Semper Fi
Arnold vs. Slick Willy?
Books in Brief
Anti-Semitism at Duke
Books in Brief
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Who We Are
Books in Brief
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"Outing" Mary Cheney
Anthony Hecht, 1923-2004
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Books in Brief
Quagmire Redux?
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Kerry's Carping
Books in Brief
True Lies
Books in Brief
Waffle Watching
Books in Brief
The Truman-Bush GOP
Books in Brief
Kerry's "Winter Soldier"
Swift Justice
Books in Brief My Name is Bill by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $24.00). Bill Wilson is the most influential American you've never heard of--unless you're a recovering alcoholic. Wilson, a near-hopeless drunk, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. The key to sobering up, he had learned,…
Kerry the Hawk
The Big Oil Candidate
Questioning Kerry
Books in Brief
Talking Turkey
Books in Brief
Antidemocratic?
The Twentieth Train: The True Story of the Ambush of the Death Train to Auschwitz by Marion Schreiber (Grove, 262 pp., $25). In this fascinating volume, Marion Schreiber, a German journalist who spent sixteen years working at Der Spiegel, tells the story of two hundred and twenty-five people who…
Portrait of the Artist
Books in Brief
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Books in Brief
Flack Jacket
Books in Brief
Public Enemy
Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting our Brightest Young Minds by Jan and Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $24). Quick, who are the least-served American schoolchildren? Apparently, it's not those who can't read their diplomas or speak the language. According to Jan and…
Unflacked
Editor's Note: Natan Sharansky was born in Ukraine in 1948 and studied mathematics in Moscow. He worked as an English interpreter for the great Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, and himself became a champion of Soviet Jewry and a worker for human rights. Convicted in 1978 on…
Less is Moore
Books in Brief Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship by John Graves (Knopf, 235 pp., $24). In a quiet way this memoir is very touching--and very American as well. John Graves, its author, is eighty-four. In going through old journals he'd kept from the late 1940s into the 1960s, prior to…
Power and Weakness
Books in Brief The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 320 pp., $24.95). James Surowiecki, business columnist of the New Yorker, explores a big idea broached by the…
Troop Dreams
Books in Brief Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? edited by Benjamin M. Friedman (MIT, 369 pp., $40). Forty years ago, most experts on inequality believed poverty itself was the cause of poverty--the result of discrimination and lack of money. The solution was, therefore,…
Europe a Creek
Books in Brief From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations by Amitai Etzioni (Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., $29.95). At one point during the early 1990s, Amitai Etzioni seemed to be everywhere--in Clinton's White House, among centrists on Capitol Hill--promoting the…
Culture Shock
Books in Brief Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite by Tibor R. Machan (Rowman & Littlefield, 144 pp., $19.95). Tibor R. Machan doesn't like the animal-rights or radical environmental movements, and with good cause. Both exhibit antihuman attitudes, he writes, for each rejects "the…
WE FEW, WE HAPPY FEW
Books in Brief
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Books in Brief The Fall of the Berlin Wall by William F. Buckley Jr. (Wiley, 212 pp., $19.95). This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And not to be missed amid the commemorations and celebrations is the new book in which William F. Buckley admits that though he…
Shruggery
Books in Brief Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball, 1903-2003 by Henry D. Fetter (W.W. Norton, 480 pp., $25.95). Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie. Thus Henry Fetter's book on how baseball teams succeed or fail uses a deceptive title to catch…
Crisis Control
Books in Brief
Exploitation Flick
Books in Brief
Postmodern History
Frederick Morgan (1922-2004)
Health Nut
Books in Brief
VICTIMS' RIGHTS
Books in Brief Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A Memoir by Joe Le Sueur (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 305 pp., $25). Beauty has rarely revenged itself on wit with such thoroughness as it does in this book. Le Sueur's memoir would make a biopic to stand beside "Citizen Kane" or "Mommie…
The Right Stuff
Books in Brief
Books in Brief Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic, edited by Peter Berkowitz (Hoover, 161 pp., $15). In his introduction to this collection of essays, Peter Berkowitz observes that the contributors share a belief in public policy's power to shape citizens--and an…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
"ONE MIGHT CONCLUDE, from his conduct over the past three years," John Podhoretz begins "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane" (St. Martin's, 276 pp., $24.95), "that George W. Bush was put on this earth to do two things: First, to lead the United States…
U.N.-Accountable
Books in Brief
Books in Brief Storms, Ice, and Whales: The Antarctic Adventures of a Dutch Artist on a Norwegian Whaler by Willem van der Does (Eerdmans, 391 pp., $29). Whaling, writes Willem van der Does, is "probably the most adventurous work that has ever existed," and few readers of his account of a 1923…
Books in Brief Loving Che by Ana Menéndez (Grove/Atlantic, 227 pp., $22). No question about it: Ernesto Che Guevara is the sexiest revolutionary of modern times. Executed October 8, 1967, by a drunken Bolivian army sergeant after he was captured while undertaking a singularly ill-organized attempt…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Books in Brief "The American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity by Allan Carlson (ISI, 211 pp., $15). Taking on those who posit individualism, capitalism, or diversity as the dominant theme of American life, Allan Carlson makes the case that the United States is best…
Books in Brief Confronting Jihad: Israel's Struggle and The World After 9/11 by Saul Singer (Cold Spring, 296 pp., $14.95). The situation in Israel, particularly the confrontation with Palestinian terrorism, is often discussed formulaically in the West, with Israel and its supporters treated as a…
Books in Brief Howard Dean: A Citizen's Guide to the Man Who Would Be President edited by Dirk Van Susteren (Steerforth, 230 pp., $12.95). When the New York Daily News called former Vermont governor Howard Dean a "motor mouth" for his comments on the Middle East this fall, Vermont's Rutland Herald…
School for Scandal
Carl Henry, 1913-2003
Books in Brief Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 224 pp., $24). Inside Laura Kipnis, there's a talented social satirist screaming to get out. Kipnis's "Against Love" attacks contemporary American ideals of love, marriage, sexual fidelity, and family life. Along the way, Kipnis…
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Books Worth Giving This Christmas Every year, as the passing seasons rest again in winter from their autumnal labors, and Christmas nears anew with its bright promise of friends and family, calling us to recollect for one brief moment our better selves, I realize with sudden freshness--like a…
Books in Brief General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 by Stanley Weintraub (Free Press, 224 pp., $25). In 1783 the greatest military in the world had been outwitted and defeated at the hands of a popular rebel leader. Yet, at the moment of victory, when a continent…
Long Songs You have to love Dana Gioia for what he's trying to do with the National Endowment for the Arts. Earlier this year, I watched him begin a presentation on the endowment's budget by reading one of Longfellow's poems--I think it was that classic of American sententiousness, "Psalm of Life":…
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Books in Brief The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman (W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $25.95). Don't bother reading the newspaper columns Paul Krugman has gathered to make this volume; his preface and introduction show clearly that would be a plentiful waste of time. It's…
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The Bunker Mentality Congress throws a whole lot of money down a whole lot of holes. But there are holes, and then there are holes, and the Capitol Visitor Center was a money pit from the beginning. Back in 1991, when Congress first approved the sprawling, underground construction, Dan Glickman, a…
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Books in Brief John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer (Oxford Univ. Press, 478 pp., $39.95). John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, coined a phrase that still reverberates--perhaps the defining phrase for America. Quoting the Gospel of Matthew, he said…
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Books in Brief Yoga Hotel by Maura Moynihan (Regan, 304 pp., $13.95). Maura Moynihan was brought to India as a teenager much against her wishes when her father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was appointed the United States ambassador there. By the time the family returned to America, young Maura had…
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Books in Brief No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26). The Thernstroms take an honest look at legislation that demands all students reach "proficiency" by 2014. As things now stand, by his senior year, the average…
Books in Brief Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in An Age of Celebrity by Roger Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 275 pp., $26). Nothing so conduces to make one's opinions seem incontrovertible as to find a critic who announces them as his own. I think Richard Diebenkorn is the greatest American…
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Books in Brief Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 441 pp., $32). You may not think "Dick," the 1999 comedy featuring Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon, is worth serious academic analysis. But…
Books in Brief How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins, 263 pp., $24.95). Recent years have seen a number of books about the fortieth president, but Peter Robinson's "How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life" offers something different: Instead of a biography or a conservative…
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Books in Brief The Legend of Proposition 13 by Joel Fox (Xlibris, 244 pp., $21.99). Few books about the 1970s tax revolt have been sympathetic to the reformers. But "The Legend of Proposition 13" is--and the attraction of the book goes far beyond its ideological sympathy. Author Joel Fox, who led…
What Derrida Is Saying Gerald Owen, writing in Canada's National Post, recently reminded us that back in May a major intellectual event took place--and it went nearly unnoticed outside Europe. It was the merging of the modern with the postmodern, in which a philosophical movement that began as a…
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On Saturday, August 9, our own Fred Barnes will be at Fenway Park throwing out the first pitch as the Red Sox take on the mighty Baltimore Orioles. Barnes, a longtime fan, will bring his heat to the mound at 7:05 p.m. His presence will no doubt inspire the team, which is locked in a tight pennant…
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Books in Brief The Wandering Hill: Vol. II of the Berrybender Narratives by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, 302 pp., $26). The arrogantly absurd Lord Albany Berrybender, his equally eccentric family, and a corps of retainers again populate this second volume of Larry McMurtry's four-novel…
Books in Brief Director's Cut by Roger L. Simon (Atria, 241 pp., $23). No one opening the eighth adventure of California private eye Moses Wine can avoid noticing its politics. In the first paragraph, Wine, the radical Berkeley grad who "had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke…
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Credibility Gap? GIVE STEPHEN F. HAYES CREDIT. With only a couple of days between the New Republic's deadline and THE WEEKLY STANDARD's, he didn't have much time to defend the Bush administration from our charges that it systematically exaggerated what American intelligence knew about Iraq's…
Books in Brief Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children by Ann Hulbert (Knopf, 450 pp., $27.50). Faced with the wall of parenting manuals in bookstores these days, a parent can understand why Dr. Spock said the most common problem is hesitancy. Ann Hulbert's "Raising…
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Books in Brief The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 217 pp., $22.95). Halberstam is a liberal journalist whose political writings you may dislike, but not his sports books. They've all been bestsellers for good reasons. They're knowledgeable, touching, and…
Books in Brief Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music by Robert R. Reilly (Morley, 351 pp., $19.95). Even the most open-minded might be surprised to see a book whose title includes both "modern music" and "beauty." One of the past century's many sad tales is how…
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Books in Brief Remembering Patsy by Brian Mansfield (Rutledge Hill, 95 pp., $14.99). Everybody likes Patsy Cline. Most of the popular country singers of the 1950s and 1960s have disappeared, known only to country music devotees. Who listens to Minnie Pearl anymore? Or Faron Young? But though Patsy…
Books in Brief The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch (Knopf, 243 pp., $24). Education historian Diane Ravitch laments the fact that the Department of Education, state boards, textbook publishers, and standardized testing companies do not defend free…
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Books in Brief Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice by Clint Bolick (Cato, 219 pp., $12). School choice is the unfinished part of the civil-rights movement--or so claims Clint Bolick in "Voucher Wars." A founder of the Institute for Justice, Bolick recounts the long battle to…
Books in Brief Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation's Capital by Christopher Buckley (Crown, 160 pp., $16). Don't mistake this charming little book for a comprehensive guide to Washington, D.C., complete with maps and metro stops and museum hours. Instead, look here for a breezy guided…
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Must Reading The Bush presidency has been so eventful, it's easy to forget that its first major public-policy crisis involved biotechnology. Despite the heat it generated, that debate over federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research was actually only a skirmish in a much-larger struggle about…
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Books in Brief The Morality of Laughter by F.H. Buckley (University of Michigan Press, 240 pp., $35). Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once began an opinion with, "I join the opinion of the Court except that portion which takes seriously, and thus encourages in the future, an argument that…
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Books in Brief
Books in Brief Revolt of the Masscult by Chris Lehmann (Prickly Paradigm, 79 pp., $10). In this, the seventh in a series of pamphlets by the oddly named Prickly Paradigm Press, Washington Post Book World deputy editor Chris Lehmann argues for Culture--with a capital C--against its many enemies,…
Amusing Guy
NOT LONG AFTER September 11, Michael Walzer asked, "Can there be a decent Left?" Watching his fellow progressives greet the destruction of the World Trade Center with "barely concealed glee," he concluded, "the Left needs to begin again." Now, in "Terror and Liberalism" (W.W. Norton, 128 pp., $21),…
Books in Brief The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education by Peter Brimelow (HarperCollins, 320 pp., $24.95). Education these days, someone once declared, is "casting false pearls before real swine." Why are contemporary students so poor? In "The Worm in the…
The Faith of the Fathers
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Books in Brief
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Books in Brief
Books in Brief
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
Books in Brief
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Contributing to the Debate
Books in Brief
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January 23, 2003 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We write to endorse the bold new course you have charted for American national security strategy. Your administration has shown impressive leadership in recognizing new threats and…
BOOKS IN BRIEF
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
BOOKS IN BRIEF Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir by John McCain, with Mark Salter Random House, 396 pp., $25.95 AS A RECOVERING McCainiac, I hesitated to pick up the new John McCain-Mark Salter volume. Their previous effort, McCain's war memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," was so good that I expected…
Editor's Note: We'll be on hiatus for the holidays, so next week, we'll be posting some of our favorite recent pieces from both The Weekly Standard and The Daily Standard--some holiday-related, some not. Enjoy, and have a terrific and safe holiday season!
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg Forge, 304 pp., $24.95
BOOKS IN BRIEF Sex, Drugs & Economics An Unconventional Introduction to Economics by Diane Coyle Texere, 263 pp., $24.95 In her vastly amusing economics primer Diane Coyle explores topics from prostitutes' wages to Japanese teenagers' fashion choices. Coyle, a former economics editor of the…
GOP LOVES NEA?
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BOOKS IN BRIEF Ghost Image by Joshua Gilder Simon & Schuster, 350 pp., $23 Switching careers is always difficult--and moving from just about any other profession to successful novel-writing may be the most difficult of all. While it hardly qualifies as high literature, former White House…
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BOOKS IN BRIEF Embracing the Firebird Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry by Janine Beichman University of Hawaii Press, 340 pp., $55 Yosano Akiko has slipped under most literary radars, an oversight corrected by Janine Beichman's literary biography. A fusion of…
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THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
BOOK RETURNS C.S. Lewis once suggested that every age has its advantages and disadvantages. His own youth suffered from the decline of civility, virtue, faith, and humanity. On the other hand, books were cheap. We can't say the same. I shudder every time I type into a review the fact that some…
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BOOKS IN BRIEF The Normal One Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling by Jeanne Safer Free Press, 204 pp., $24 Some time into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the public was told that his picture-book family included a retarded sister who was reared by the family to seem nearly normal. (This…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
In "CAIR-Less with the Truth," by Jake Tapper (Oct. 7), an error in the translation led to the misattribution of a quotation to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). It was not Mr. Awad but the interviewer, Sanaa Al-Said of the Egyptian newspaper…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 260 pp., $24.95 In Palahniuk's stories, there usually seem to be two kinds of people: suckers who believe in widely accepted moral codes, and anti-social rebels asserting their own idiosyncratic philosophies. His latest effort is therefore a…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Shooting Straight Telling the Truth about Guns in America by Wayne LaPierre and James J. Baker Regnery, 202 pp., $27.95 Can Gun Control Work? by James B. Jacobs Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $27.50 Read these two books and you'll discover a curious thing: The case against gun…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Ulysses S. Grant on Leadership Executive Lessons from the Front Lines by John A. Barnes Prima, 276 pp., $22.95 This is the latest revisionist effort to bolster the reputation of Grant as a military and political leader. The book deserves far more attention than it has received. The…
Not the New York Review of Books From 1982 until its demise in 1988, the Claremont Review of Books was an important publication, particularly for conservatives who had few other venues in which to present their ideas. Returning to print in November 2000, the revived quarterly has just put out its…
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BOOKS IN BRIEF Poems of New York edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Everyman's Library, 256 pp., $12.50 I've long thought the three great subjects for art are faith, love, and New York City, so I was eager to open Poems of New York, a small-format paperback in the revived Everyman's Library. What a…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Hotel Kid by Stephen Lewis Paul Dry, 214 pp., $22.95 Stephen Lewis's atmospheric memoir inevitably calls to mind another Manhattan hotel kid: Eloise, the tyke who lived at the Plaza in the series of children's books by Kay Thompson. But the similarity is only residential. Eloise was…
A PRINT RUN OF ONE'S OWN Roger Kimball, the critic and managing editor at the New Criterion, has a book just out called "Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity" (Cybereditions, 222pp., $17.95). Collecting his occasional essays on Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Paul Klee,…
TOO RICH Remember Denise Rich? The Clinton pardon scandal lady? She was born wealthy, the daughter of a shoe manufacturer. She married wealthier, to financier Marc Rich, who during their time together earned more than a billion dollars--and mug-shot status on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. But…
THE ELEPHANT REVISITED IN HER ARTICLE "The Elephant in the Sacristy" (June 17), Mary Eberstadt suggests that I was trying to minimize the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church by stressing that most of the acts involved are "ephebophilia" (acts with older teenagers), and therefore less damaging than…
DEATH IMITATES ART The news stories read like the opening of a mystery novel. In the early morning of July 4, in Morristown, New Jersey, a man named Mark McGarrity was found dead on the hard ground outside his apartment. An accident, the police insisted. The fifty-eight-year-old man--an occasional…
A FORD, NOT A SHAKESPEARE You remember the headlines back at the end of 1995? "New Work by Shakespeare," "Literary Sleuth Uncovers Lost Poem by the Bard," "Did the Swan of Avon Write It?" It all started when a Vassar professor named Donald Foster claimed to have demonstrated that Shakespeare was…
BOOKS IN BRIEF American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Richard Blow (Henry Holt, 288 pp., $25). Take the celebrity heir to a political fortune, trying both to embrace and to evade the family legacy, and you have George, the first political magazine produced wholly by and for people who…
The Fifty-Year Wound The True Price of America's Cold War Victory by Derek Leebaert Little Brown, 704 pp., $29.95 A SORE LOSER is easy to find, but you don't come across many sore winners. Nonetheless, they exist--and for proof, you need look no further than Derek Leebaert, whose book on the Cold…
Stephen F. Hayes's "Uncle Sam's Makeover" (June 3) correctly identifies the vital importance of communicating America's values and policies to the Muslim world, but Hayes describes the public diplomacy programs that I direct at the State Department only partially. The important readership of The…
CARTER'S BANK SHOT Stephen L. Carter is a well-known Yale law professor, African-American moderate, and author of such books as "The Culture of Disbelief." He's also written a new mystery/thriller called "The Emperor of Ocean Park" (Knopf, 657, $26.95). Carter is used to receiving flattering…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Married A Fine Predicament by Anne Roiphe Basic, 285 pp., $25 Feminists appear to be having second thoughts about the institution they deconstructed, now that the woods are teeming with unhappy singles. "There is abroad in the land an acute anxiety about marriage," announces Anne…
The Modern Pillory by Pim Fortuyn The subject of pedophilia is all over the newspapers. Following the Doutroux affair in Belgium, the Netherlands has its own affairs, ripe and green, from murder to children's' mutual fondling. When I was a child, children's' explorations fell under the rubric of…
TYPECASTING Back in our February 25 issue, western writer Bill Croke reviewed Judy Blunt's prize-winning memoir "Breaking Clean"--regretting some of its easy feminist tropes, but praising its account of a childhood and marriage on the Hi Line in northern Montana. Like many other reviewers, Croke…
Women in the Barracks The VMI Case and Equal Rights by Philippa Strum University Press of Kansas, 448 pp., $34.95 Philippa Strum's "Women in the Barracks" is a tale of good versus evil. Including everything from sociological critiques of all-male military schools as "male bonding rituals" (which…
ANTI-ANTI-COMMUNISM, YET AGAIN Athan G. Theoharis has made a career out of the FBI. He produced a book called "J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime," another called "The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition," another called "From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover," another called .…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Put a Lid on It by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious, 247 pp., $23.95) Westlake has entered new territory--presidential politics--with typically Westlakeian results. A judicious mix of satire and Westlake's trademark comedy of criminals, "Put a Lid on It" tells what happens when an…
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THE DAY THE BOOK CLUB DIED Book sales are down everywhere, review sections in newspapers across the nation are being trimmed, popular fiction hasn't met serious fiction for so long they might as well be on different planets--and now Oprah Winfrey's book club is no more. That last fact may actually…
ONE STEP FROM DEATH The Weekly Standard doesn't review much mass-market genre fiction, figuring such books manage to find readers all by themselves. But you may want to check out Dean R. Koontz's latest. Koontz is the bestselling author of such black thrillers and horror stories as "The Servants of…
Sponsored by the Project for the New American Century: April 3, 2002 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We write to thank you for your courageous leadership in the war on terrorism and to offer our full support as you continue to protect…
WHO NOW READS DICKENS? Harvard's literature professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been much celebrated in recent weeks for his discovery, purchase, and plans to publish a 300-page handwritten manuscript called "The Bondswoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, recently Escaped from North…
BEWITCHED AT THE BOOKSTORE Seven books on witchcraft were published in the first two weeks of January 2002. That's up from five a year as recently as the 1980s, and fewer than one a year in the first half of the twentieth century. Interest in the contemporary pagan mishmash known as Wicca is…
FOR ART'S SAKE The worst effect of the contemporary art scene may be the way it turns even those who love art into howling philistines. There's something irresistible about reporting, as The Weekly Standard did back in November, that a cleaning man had swept up and bagged as trash an expensive…
BOOK OF THE WEEK Losing His Stuff The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James Free Press, 998 pp., $45 There was a time I was sure the greatest pieces of American prose were the letters of Adams and Jefferson, "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and "The…
BOOK OF THE WEEK ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON The Clash of Orthodoxies Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis by Robert P. George (ISI, 387 pp., $24.95) Here's the problem for religious believers, as most of America's intellectuals see it: In a democracy, the only way we can do politics is by rational…
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Coming Collapse of China by Gordon G. Chang (Random House, 320 pp., $26.95) When, in the early 1970s, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?", he was wrong about the date, but right about the collapse. Now Gordon Chang, an American lawyer…
Tolkien, the Book Rereading Lord of the Rings by J. Bottum THE ENDLESS TALK about "The Lord of the Rings" almost--almost--convinces me to see the movie. We live in the highest age of moviemaking, and J.R.R. Tolkien was unfilmable in any convincing way before computer-aided techniques came along.…
BOOKS IN BRIEF Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, 123 pp., $14.95). Here are some instructions for reading "Holidays on Ice": Rip out pages 45 through 123 and use them as coasters while you read the remaining essay. Actually, the other five pieces in David Sedaris's collection are…
CHRISTMAS BOOKS IN BRIEF Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages selected by Harold Bloom (Scribner, 570 pp., $27.50) What is Bloom up to? Every time he publishes a book of nutty postmodernness, he follows it with a book so old-fashioned it's positively premodern. He's…
THE WUBBULOUS WORLD OF OPERA The scathing reviews of the New York City Opera's premiere of "Lilith" are a sign of just how bad it was: There's so little new opera that reviewers long to praise. But maybe the company should have seen disaster coming. Composer Deborah Drattell explained she was…
SETH BENARDETE, 1930-2001 by Harvey Mansfield Seth Benardete was a scholar, a philosopher, and a most extraordinary man. His post in life was to be a classics professor at New York University, but he was not an especially prominent professor. Nor was he much known in the world of public…
LOONY LEFTISTS (CONT'D) We thought perhaps the London Review of Books was getting better. It could hardly get worse after its Oct. 4 parade of writers denouncing America. Columbia historian Eric Foner wrote: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the…
MORE SONTAGS This week's Susan Sontag Certificate--The Standard Reader's way of acknowledging inanity by artists and intellectuals--goes to the Columbia University faculty senate, which voted 46 to 0 to "reaffirm open discourse as a prime value in our community." Almost anywhere else, we'd applaud…
PRIZING ANTI-AMERICANISM If you ran an American foundation with a whole lot of money--so much money that you give out each year what are, after the Nobel prize, the biggest monetary awards for literature in the world--on whom would you bestow your largesse for 2001? Well, as it turns out, the…
LIFE GOES ON Over a dozen readers sent in to The Standard Reader articles about Emmanuel Asare, cleaning man and unwitting art critic, who, tidying a London gallery on Oct. 16, bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst. Of course, Asare was helped by the fact that it was…
Oct. 31, 2001 William Kristol Editor The Weekly Standard Washington, D.C. Via e-mail and fax Dear Mr. Kristol: In his Daily Standard column "Accuracy in Media," Stephen Hayes not only misses the point of our guidelines to avoid racial and religious stereotyping, but he twists them beyond…
THE SONTAG AWARD BY RIGHTS, the latest Susan Sontag Award--our acknowledgment of inanity by intellectuals and artists--belongs to playwright Tony Kushner, author of "Angels in America." He started by telling the Los Angeles Times, "I'm hoping people will be respectful of the horror--unlike Bush,…
From: across@spj.org Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 18:28:48 -0500 To:webeditor@weeklystandard.com Subject: Respond to Article: Stephen F. Hayes 10/26/2001 To: Stephen Hayes, Fred Barnes From: Al Cross, SPJ president Sally Lehrman, chair of SPJ's Diversity Committee, is preparing a reply to your 10/26…
THE SONTAG AWARD This week's winner is the London Review of Books, which asked its regular writers for commentary on the terrorist attack against the United States. The result is an extraordinary tissue of political hatred, intellectual vulgarity, and moral incapacity. The entire issue belongs in a…
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this issue, The Weekly Standard begins a new feature: The Standard Reader, a section of commentary on books, arts, and ideas. Week after week, under restrictions of space, we found ourselves forced to ignore events, books, and intellectual items deserving mockery or praise.…
What follows is part of a personal letter from a 38-year-old Karachi businessman to a fellow Pakistani friend in the Washington area. Americans have heard innumerable warnings that we shouldn’t fault Muslims as a whole—but almost no testimony from the communities whose hospitality was abused by the…
September 20, 2001 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President, We write to endorse your admirable commitment to "lead the world to victory" in the war against terrorism. We fully support your call for "a broad and sustained campaign" against the…
BECAUSE OF AN EDITING ERROR, in John Wilson's review of Aiding and Abetting in our last issue, the date of publication for Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was given as 1969 instead of 1961.
We are reliably informed that a couple of details in an article in our February 12 issue ("The Minister of Ministries," by Fred Barnes) were incorrect. Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who had been George W. Bush's first choice to head the faith-based initiative, did not ask for…
Baltimore, MD -- As unbelievable as it seems the key to stopping many cancers has been around for over 30 years. Yet it has been banned. Blocked. And kept out of your medicine cabinet by the very agency designed to protect your health -- the FDA.
There was a curious exchange in the Nov. 28, 1999 Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) between letter-writer Jack Ferguson and M. Francis Mannion, who's been writing the Q&A feature in OSV. Ferguson complained that certain of Mannion's answers are "fuzzy." Indeed! For example, Mannion said that "God . . . may…
The Modern Jewish Canon
The Modern Jewish Canon
On Friday afternoon, December 8, a 4-3 majority of the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that required the state to immediately implement Al Gore's scheme to "recount" his way to the presidency. The majority's opinion is unique in the annals of judicial capriciousness and overreach: an…
Exhibit 1
In an effort to promote the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a racially diverse campus, university officials digitally inserted a black student's face into a photograph of white Badger football fans that was used on the cover of their new undergraduate application . . .
Fred Barnes reported last week that Bob Dole had declined to meet with Cardinal O'Connor of New York during the 1996 presidential campaign ("George W. Bush's Catholic Problem"). Mr. Dole informs us that he did in fact meet with O'Connor.
Correction of the week, from the Guardian (London): "In a letter, page 25, December 4, about a fashion spread in the Style pages of G2 the previous day, the author lamented the decision to show 'whey-faced bony child-women in dressing-up frocks whose bodices are tragically empty and dimpled.' This…
The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently distributed a brochure, intended for tenants in subsidized housing, entitled "Resident Rights and Responsibilities." It appeared in various translations, including Spanish, French, Korean, and Portuguese. But it was the "Creole" translation…
-- News item
THE WEATHER WAS GOOD, the setting was beautiful, but all was not well in the land of the tomato growers. The government was not happy. On September 8, the 24th annual Joint Tomato Conference opened at the Naples, Fla., Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Peter Harllee Jr., chairman of the Florida Tomato Committee,…
AN ARTICLE by Elliott C. Rothenberg in our July 20 issue ("The Terrorist Next Door") mistakenly attributed to Jay Benanav of the St. Paul, Minn., city council the statement that Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Kathleen Soliah, a.k.a. "Sara Jane Olson," had been a "great citizen of our…
Shark in Sea of Dark Suits
Conservative wing of major political party seeks leader. Must be able to articulate Reaganite philosophy on issues of economic freedom, national security, and social morality. Note: This position is available only to candidates who have previously won election to a major political office.
Last Thursday, the New York Times ran one of its "At Home With . . . " features on Tony Hiss, son of the late Communist spy Alger Hiss and author of a new memoir. It would be churlish to fault Mr. Hiss's wife Lois Metzger for comparing Alger Hiss to her own grandmother, who survived the Nazi…
Joseph Epstein's new collection of essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin, and at $ 25.00, it's a steal. Epstein is one of the country's premier men of letters and (no coincidence) a contributing editor to this magazine. In the new collection, readers will…
Contributing editor Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant. Contact Borden Flanagan at 1225 19th St., NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20036.
Dick Gephardt's new book won't get much attention since the ranking House Democrat decided several months ago not to run for his party's presidential nomination. There's probably no book quite so deservedly forlorn as the campaign biography without a campaign. Nonetheless, the Gephardt volume…
And it simply will not go away. Occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College has been trying valiantly for years to exterminate the most widely circulated bogus quotation in hack-punditdom: "America is great because America is good," and so on, inevitably…
Does Ted Turner, as they say nowadays, have issues with young people? Not long ago CNN's aging frat-boy CEO was regretting that he had, in his words, had "five kids -- boom, boom, boom -- by the time I was 30," adding, "If I was doing it over again I wouldn't have done it, but I can't shoot them…
In the latest reminder that racial preferences in college admissions will not go quietly, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education has been circulating draft guidelines that propose penalizing universities that use SAT scores as a leading criterion when making admissions…
Later that week, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang. A woman was on the line. You know that story you had in the magazine this week about the woman Clinton made sexual overtures to in the hideaway office? she asked.
Israel was founded fifty years ago. It has been a fixture in our lives for all of that time. It has played and continues to play a role -- in our emotional lives, economically, politically, and militarily -- way beyond its size and its population. Whatever our personal feelings and background, life…
The bad news is settling in -- starting to seem real. Some take this as a cue to leave, others to dance. But really: Somebody has to do something about this music. "It's Not Unusual" was bad enough. But now, just as the big-screen TVs announce another Republican defeat, the band cranks up to top…
This is where supporters of D.C. mayoral candidate Anthony Williams (no relation to Armstrong) have come to celebrate their man's victory. Spirits are high -- and not merely because of Williams's crushing defeat of his Republican rival. All night, partiers have been buzzing about the North Carolina…
Twenty-five minutes stuck in an elevator with Alfonse D'Amato and Ed Koch. Let's repeat that: Twenty-five minutes stuck in an elevator with BOTH Alfonse D'Amato and Ed Koch. There are now twelve people in the world who know how that feels. The rest of us can wear little black lapel ribbons: Free…
A receptionist picks up the phone at DNC headquarters, a modern office building in the shadow of an overpass half a mile south of the Capitol. It's a reporter on the line, calling to ask about the poll numbers that have begun leaking out of the networks. It looks like some surprising Democratic…
The party's just started, and it has the deflated feel of a high-school dance an hour before the prom queen and the star quarterback arrive. A 10-piece oldies band is cranking out the Tom Jones hit "It's Not Unusual," but no one's dancing. (Actually, no one's danced to "It's Not Unusual" in 30…
It's still early, but already New York Republicans in the ballroom are filled with foreboding. Exit polls show Sen. Alfonse D'Amato down by as much as 10 points. Immediately the rumor spreads through the ballroom: The exit-polling company has messed up the sample! The results are so unreliable, TV…
"We like Newt, but we love Bob Barr," says Sally Vaci, a graphic designer who lives right here in Newt Gingrich's hometown. Vaci, along with her husband, has found her way to the bar at Ruby Tuesday's to watch the returns on CNN. Vaci doesn't work in politics, but she seems to know at least as much…
The prom queen and the star quarterback still haven't arrived, but the place is filling up with people who look oddly as though they wished they were somewhere else. Armstrong Williams, the hyperactive radio-talk-show host, comes to the podium and tries to whip the lethargic crowd into a frenzy,…
You might think that, after several decades of plundering members' paychecks, the greatest labor guild in the world would have a more impressive headquarters. But up here on the eighth floor, in a conference room overlooking the White House, the style is strictly tech-school baroque.
The press has come for the impromptu party. But a half-dozen stringy-haired coed volunteers (one is reading a book called American Apartheid) are manning the right-hand side of a gauntlet in the lobby.
Trent Lott is here! He takes the stage to warm applause, but his remarks are lackluster. His big applause line: "When this night is over, we will have picked up seats in the United States Senate!" The line lands with a thud, and as Lott often does in difficult situations, he quickly makes matters…
John Sweeney swigs Cabernet out of a plastic cup, but don't be misled: The AFL-CIO also serves lunchbucket suds, American-made -- Bud or Bud Light for these horny-handed sons of toil. The only imports here are the waiters, who are quick to point out that they're union and that they're leaving at 10…
The ballroom is pulsating with all the frenzied energy we associate with the name "Pataki." A group of gray-suited Tommy Newsome clones mill about the half-filled chamber. "Lets make some noise!" the master of ceremonies screams. Tepid applause. "Come on people! Let's make some noise!" Tepid…
Okay, here's the Big Democratic Party party, in yacht-club-esque surroundings right next door to the Democratic National Committee. But some old ladies are zealously vetting the guests, and they're keeping the press out. There's a buy-a-ticket cash bar, we learn. Cheers erupt from within. CNN has…
The bar is still glum, as the beer-drinkers imbibe the crushing news about Lauch and Fob. A couple of brave Republicans try to put the best face on the news. "Remember, that's a CNN estimate," says one. "That's the Clinton News Network talking." No one else seems convinced. Within about a beer, the…
The boredom -- and the hermetic isolation -- have been so bad that one camerawoman for a Japanese network has spent the last hour diligently filling dozens of 4-by-6 index cards with handwriting. Look down, and you'll notice they read, "Roommate wanted: Male, Non-smoker . . . "
(slightly abridged)
The Taliban, the militant rulers of Afghanistan who also play benevolent landlord to terrorist Osama Bin Laden, are in an undeniable public-relations tailspin. Their two-year reign, if you believe infidel Western foreign correspondents, has been a roundelay of compulsory dress codes, public…
"I would hope every American adult, even those who smoke, would think, as I had to when I became president and I had this occasional bad habit of having my cigar once in a while, I would hope they would think about not doing it in public, not doing it around children, not setting a bad example. I…
So what's Bill Clinton's reward for pushing the (ill-advised) Chemical Weapons Convention through the Senate last year? Being undercut by the arms controllers at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- the bureaucracy that oversees compliance with the chemical-arms treaty.
Another revealing sign of the incredible parochialism of the New York Times. On August 28, the Times ran a story on how women view Clinton, based on "dozens of interviews across the country." The story found that while "women" are disappointed in the president, many would vote for him again.
"Sex wasn't on my mind when I sat down across from the president," writes the reporter Nina Burleigh in an article in this month's Mirabella magazine. Notwithstanding the implausibility of these words -- who can sit across from the president these days and not think about sex? -- her words have…
One month ago, House speaker Newt Gingrich responded to the National Right to Work Committee's questionnaire for congressional candidates. The first question was: Would he "co-sponsor and seek roll-call votes on legislation to repeal the provisions in federal laws which authorize compulsory union…
Among Republican presidential candidates, John McCain looks to have the inside lane for winning the support of that scarce but highly sought after constituency, the Hollywood celebrity Republican.
Long ago, in March, the Pentagon promised a report on its disclosure of information from Linda Tripp's confidential security file to the media. By the time the middle of June rolled around, Congress had gotten restless. Gerald Solomon, chairman of the House Rules Committee, demanded to know when…
Last week's cover photograph of Bill Clinton doing his chin thing should have been jointly credited to Kenneth Lambert and the Washington Times.
WEEK AFTER SCANDALOUS WEEK, feminists remained conspicuously silent about the allegations of sexual misconduct facing President Clinton. Then, on March 15, National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland spoke -- in a peep masquerading as a roar. On CNN's Late Edition, Ireland said of…
DEAR KATE,
In June, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 28 writers, thinkers, activists, and political professsionals for their thoughts on the following proposition:
In Jim Sleeper's "Ward Connerly Gets Pinched" last week, it was stated that 40 percent of black voters in California had supported Proposition 209. Exit polling suggested that, in fact, about 25 percent had done so.
REPUBLICANS DO BEST IN THE DEBATE over racial preferences when they spotlight the least defensible aspects of the civil-rights industry -- not its lofty intentions but the grubby reality of race politics. Thus, the defenders of affirmative action fell silent at a House hearing last month when a…
DEPUTY TREASURY SECRETARY Lawrence Summers recently asserted that greed was the primary motivating force among tax-cut advocates in the United States. But to really see people trying to keep more of their own money, Summers should take a few detours on his next trip to Europe. While greedy…
Paul Cantor scathingly dissects Joseph Sobran's conviction that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays bearing William Shakespeare's name. I would like to add a few words.
THE BOOK THAT'S THE TALK OF MOVIE-GOERS EVERYWHERE
Clinton scandal stories have been breaking so fast -- and so often, sometimes two and three of them on each day's front pages -- that we're frankly having trouble keeping track of them all. And we get paid to do it. So we figure our readers could certainly use a helpful crib sheet. Here, then, is a…
In 1969, the United States decided it was going to "comprehensively solve" the Middle East. Ever since, American officials have dreamed that they might be able to find the solution of all solutions, the key to amity in and around the world's holy sites, and a ticket to Norway for the Nobel…
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans have faced a pleasant but eerie international situation: Not only has there been no other power capable of challenging U.S. preeminence in the world, it has been hard even to imagine where such a threat could possibly emerge. The nations rich enough…
Despite the gushing coverage they receive, inaugural balls are never any fun. They're not glittery, they're not glamorous, and they're hardly exclusive (you can purchase an invitation, after all, through Ticketmaster). The Clintons, however, may just set a record for tawdriness. What follows is a…
The week between Christmas and New Year's, usually a dead time for punditry, sprang to political life when Newt Gingrich found himself in trouble yet again. For the media and the Democrats, the situation is simple: Newt bad, Newt forced to admit error, Newt dead.
First as federal traffic-safety czarina for Jimmy Carter, and today as president of the Naderite outfit Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook has spent an entire career accusing automakers of scrimping on safety because it costs money -- in other words, of profiting from death and injury. And she is…
An unintended consequence of Bill Clinton's decision to pass up George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, as secretary of state: Mitchell is likely to be the new baseball commissioner. It's the job he wanted anyway. It pays more. He can travel with his wife. Mitchell has been ready to…
Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Leon Lett has been suspended for a year without pay, after testing positive for cocaine in the last week of November. Lett is best remembered for fumbling his own fumble recovery while strutting into the end zone in the fourth quarter of Dallas's blowout of Buffalo…
In a private conversation with his toe-sucking consultant Dick Morris, you may recall, President Clinton once played an earnest game of "rank the presidents." The presidency's historical "first tier" was probably out of reach, Clinton decided. But with a strong showing n his second term, he guessed…
STEVE MERRILL IS THE WILDLY POPULAR Republican governor of New Hampshire who will soon be out of a job. He s retiring voluntarily -- he won reelection two years ago with 70 percent of the vote -- but he'd like to stay involved in GOP politics. That explains why in the course of a short conversation…
AFSCME PARTY, 8:00 PM
The Washington Post has editorialized against colorblind public policies, but it has embraced colorblindness in an area where color presumably does matter -- in describing the appearance of individuals. And in an instance where appearance matters in alerting readers to keep an eye out for suspected…
A few months ago, Michael Lind delivered a primal scream of a book about how the Republican party is intellectually inert and conservatism is a secretive conspiracy. After letting his rage out in the pages of Out of Conservatism, Lind is feeling much better. In last week's New Yorker, he argues…
Big spending on the campaign trail causes tidal waves of criticism for wealthy Republican office-seekers. Not so for their Democratic counterparts. When Michael Huffington spent over $ 29 million in California for his 1994 Senate campaign, the media charged him with trying to buy the election. This…
For weeks now, the Scrapbook has been chronicling the strange, symbiotic relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-side publicist Jude Wanniski. Now comes a piece of primary evidence on the meaning of Jack 'n' Jude. It's located on Wanniski's Web site, which he uses for the worldwide distribution…
MICHAEL FOX calls school vouchers "the civil-rights issue of our generation. " Two years ago, when Republicans took control of the Ohio House of Representatives for the first time in his 22-year legislative career, Fox pushed through an innovative voucher experiment in Cleveland. As a result, right…
I AM RIDING WITH THE KING, and not your bushleague Huey Long or Elvis variety of royalty either. For in the Piedmont, where they crank out stockcar racing champions like western Pennsylvania does quarterbacks or East St. Louis does crack dealers, Richard Petty is still the King of NASCAR -- even…
In the abortion world, the Lovejoy Surgicenter in Portland, Oregon, is famous. Over 4,000 abortions took place there in 1995, making it one of the highest-volume such clinics in the country. Lovejoy's doctors perform abortions as late as 25 weeks into pregnancy, and the center has been a favorite…
On the night of the first presidential debate, in a cramped hotel room near Giants Stadium, three members of the Dole campaign's advance team mix a round of gin-and-Diet-Cokes and settle in to watch their candidate. The advancemen are tired, having worked 18-hour days for most of the week preparing…
BACK AT THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER, three weeks before Louisiana's "jungle" primary for the seat of retiring Senate Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, the state's Republicans were in a funk. Six GOP candidates were running against two Democrats, and Republicans feared the six would split the…
Mario CUOMO'S SPEECH Tuesday night fell far short of his performance in 1984. Its impact on the convention floor was dwarfed by Jesse Jackson's oration a few minutes earlier. But Cuomo, more than any other speaker last week, did succeed in highlighting a fundamental difference -- perhaps the…
When a bunch of Olympic athletes hit the podium on Wednesday, their medals swinging around their necks, the band struck up a familiar march that seemed to be making a mockery of their appearance. In fact, a few of us laughed aloud at the sound. Why? Because the march that introduced them doubled as…
Ed Rollins doesn't like Arianna Huffington. We know this. We also know that Ed Rollins got $ 1 million for his new book in part because he decided to attack Arianna Huffington -- even though he worked for her husband's senatorial campaign in 1994 and collected a great deal of money from it.
Time was, a conscientious reporter could travel to a convention, study the proceedings, interview the delegates, calibrate their controversies, absorb the party's message, filter it through to a waiting nation, and get ripped.
Reporters are deluged at conventions by press releases, faxes, speech texts, free copies of newspapers and magazines, and other forms of printed detritus meant to elevate the profile of a pol, a news organ, or a political party. But the Marriott Corporation took the concept of "spin" to new heights…
Leading up to Susan Molinari's keynote speech, NBC's Tom Brokaw let drop one of those colorful little anecdotes that campaigns love to feed willing anchorfolk. According to Brokaw, Molinari was changing the diapers of her telegenic infant Susan Ruby Paxon the other day when the baby "had an…
Tuesday night, Sidney Blumenthal of the New Yorker -- the most notorious Clinton suck-up in the American media, bar none -- sat having a drink in the bar in the Marriott lobby with a number of fellow liberal scribes, including Jeff Greenfield, Hendrik Hertzberg, Garry Wills, Jacob Weisberg, and…
It is with great pride and humility that we at THE WEEKLY STANDARD present the first set of convention awards. In honor of the spirit of San Diego, we are calling our awards the Treaclys. A partial list of nominees and winners:
The first promise Susan Molinari made in her keynote address Tuesday night was to keep the speech short. She did. She had no choice. Like every other speaker at the convention, Molinari faced three lights as she stood at the podium. The first light was timed to go off when a speaker was 30 seconds…
When 15 or so close relatives of Bob Dole's appeared outside the convention center Monday morning, they were denied entrance by the ubiquitous security guards. Why? It seemed no one in the Dole campaign had bothered to obtain credentials for them. When deputy campaign manager Rick Davis learned of…
Martin Mawyer, president of the Christian Action Network, found himself arguing on his adversaries' turf Tuesday when he debated Rich Tafel, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, on "The Role of Homosexuals in the Republican Party."
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a staff assistant/receptionist. The job is administrative, and the responsibilities include phones, mail, back issues, correspondence, and other general administrative duties. The ideal candidate would be organized, hard-working, and…
MIDWAY THROUGH THE OPENING DAY of the Republican party's platform committee meetings, Gary Bauer and Ann Stone met in the hallway to talk, and the encounter between the Christian conservative and the pro-choice activist drew a crowd of reporters. As the two spoke in intense but earnest tones -- "…
IF A TERRORIST GROUP CAUSED THE DEATHS of the TWA Flight 800 passengers, politicians and pundits will inevitably redouble pious calls for heightening security at airports. Some may even call for a limited military strike against a particular group or its sponsor. Such measures, while consistent…
So Susan Molinari will be the keynote speaker at this year's Republican convention, joining an august list of stem-winding luminaries including Harold Stassen, Mark Hatfield, Dan Evans (who?), Richard Lugar, Guy Vander Jagt, Katherine Davalos Ortega (who again?), and Tom Kean. In fact, in the last…
The June 24 Saudi Arabian bombing led President Clinton to warn that "the cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished." If there is one act more predictable than the Pledge of Allegiance before school, it's the invocation of "cowardice" by U.S. presidents every time a bomb goes…
The June 24 Saudi Arabian bombing led President Clinton to warn that "the cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished." If there is one act more predictable than the Pledge of Allegiance before school, it's the invocation of "cowardice" by U.S. presidents every time a bomb goes…
Buckle your chin strap, America: The man they call "consumer-advocate Ralph Nader" is running for president. His party is the Green party, and last week he issued something of a manifesto in the pages of the Nation. Titled "A Voice, Not an Echo" (itself an evocation of Barry Goldwater's slogan in…
Buckle your chin strap, America: The man they call "consumer-advocate Ralph Nader" is running for president. His party is the Green party, and last week he issued something of a manifesto in the pages of the Nation. Titled "A Voice, Not an Echo" (itself an evocation of Barry Goldwater's slogan in…
Unlimited Access, a new book by a retired FBI agent once assigned to the Clinton White House, is out this week from Regnery. Gary Aldrich's memoir will get widespread attention for the immediately relevant charges it features -- that the White House allowed staffers without proper security…
Unlimited Access, a new book by a retired FBI agent once assigned to the Clinton White House, is out this week from Regnery. Gary Aldrich's memoir will get widespread attention for the immediately relevant charges it features -- that the White House allowed staffers without proper security…
At a private Washington reception this past week, one GOP strategist was asked virtually the same question by three prominent Democrats: "When is Dole going to begin doing something?" One of the Democrats, a senior member of the White House staff, expressed amazement at how easy it had been for the…
At a private Washington reception this past week, one GOP strategist was asked virtually the same question by three prominent Democrats: "When is Dole going to begin doing something?" One of the Democrats, a senior member of the White House staff, expressed amazement at how easy it had been for the…
Ice hockey is a Bob Dole kind of sport: It's about hard work; it's about small-town values; experience; whatever. Growing up in the New York exurbs, I became a New York Rangers fan, waiting on them year after year as they fumbled away every chance to repeat their Stanley Cup triumph of 1940. But I…
Ice hockey is a Bob Dole kind of sport: It's about hard work; it's about small-town values; experience; whatever. Growing up in the New York exurbs, I became a New York Rangers fan, waiting on them year after year as they fumbled away every chance to repeat their Stanley Cup triumph of 1940. But I…
We welcome (albeit skeptically) Friday's Israel-Lebanon-Syria cease-fire agreement, the latest interruption in the chronic violence that is international politics in the real Middle East.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD will, of course, be chronicling the ups and downs, the maneuvers and gyrations, of the Republican VP possibilities in the coming months. This week, we note a particularly striking invitation from one hopeful, California attorney general Dan Lungren -- striking because it seeks…
Adisembodied voice with an impeccable English accent speaks. "We're talking with Natalie Merchant, whose new solo album Tigerlily is topping the charts and wowing the critics." It sounds like an MTV interview, or maybe a radio clip, but there is no commercial, no station ID, nothing to indicate the…
Ashattered, divided city, its war-weary population kept alive by airlift. A nation scarred by horrifying genocidal violence. American and allied troops warily keeping order.
n his fine article "Affirmative Reaction" (Mar. ll), Matthew Rees describes congressional Republicans" considerable support for, and reluctance about, the eliore to end racial and gender preferences. Some regard that effort as in conflict with empowerment agenda. They are complementary.
We may yet have cause to be grateful to Patrick J. Buchanan, for his success poses the most important political challenge of the year for Republicans. How the other serious Republican candidates, Robert Dole and Lamar Alexander, respond in the next few weeks to that challenge will demonstrate…
Bob Dole seems inarticulate. But entertain the possibility for a moment that he is actually pioneering a new form of eloquence. Imagine if the great orators of history had used the Dole style: the choppy delivery, the random word asociations, the tendency to speak about oneself in the third person.…
By an overwhelming margin, readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have voted to keep the Reading List. The vote was 18 in favor, 3 against (though the " against" ballot cast by American Scholar editor and noted literary critic Joseph Epstein we gave the weight of six ordinary votes; remember, this is a…
The recent passing of former California governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown brought back a flood of political memories. Journalist David S. Broder hailed him as "one of the true blithe spirits of 20th-century politics," "avisionary, " and "the most amiable of companions." Remarked a former Brown press…
Many second-tier GOP presidential campaigns have been waiting desperately for the United States Secret Service to ride to their rescue -- not for protection for their candidate, but because the Secret Service actually helps pay for campaign charter planes. The campaigns were hoping that the Secret…
ON JANUARY 4, THE FRONT PAGE of the Los Angeles Times extolled a string of untold Cold War successes of the Central Intelligence Agency. Reporter James Risen dwelt especially on one feat of "American bravery," when CIA agents installed eavesdropping equipment in tunnels and sewers below Moscow. It…
In the name of The One Above, I offer greetings to my fellow warriors! Today, with His grace, I speak of our great victory over our most evil enemy, America. A little more than 10 years ago experts thought that what became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs would leave developing nations…
I'n Bombay, the most cosmopolitan of Indian cities, one rarely .even sees the road. The streets are covered by a thick carpet of taxis, trucks, and people -- and bereft of lanes or signals. Traffic is a free-for-all resulting in what my teenage brother calls NDEs (for "near death experiences"),…
I am no longer hip. The agency of my discovery was a radio station that specializes in "alternative" rock: An abrasive song by some angry grunge band came on during a drive, and I immediately punched to a classical-music station. Only a few years earlier I had been on the rock 'n' roll cutting…
Republicans in Florida are saying that the big news, come Nov. 18, could be Lamar Alexander. That day, 3,700 delegates show up in Orlando for Presidency III, the strange name the state party is giving to its straw poll, and private polling shows a tight race between the struggling Alexander,…
Bill Clinton's repudiation of his own 1993 tax increase, and then his semi- repudiation of his repudiation, again reveal his increasingly bizarre weakness for the unnecessary lie. Faced with a roomful of rich people in Texas last week, the president decided, as is his wont, to demonstrate his…
Just how bad are things for the Democrats? In an Oct. 19 appearance on Larry King Live, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, discussed Bosnia and American race relations. The show starring this less than dynamic duo would have…
For or whites, the racial gulf in America has never felt so wide these past 20 years or more -- how can most American blacks believe (or say they believe) that O. J. Simpson is innocent of a crime science tells us there is a one-in-a-billion chance he did not commit? What is to be done?
President Clinton never lets you down. At a White House luncheon on September 25 with several dozen media friends (and a few critics), he tossed off a fresh whopper. Gays in the military? "Well, to be fair, I didn't take that on," he declared. "That was an issue that was visited on the presidency..…
In a recent episode of Good Morning America, former first child Patti Davis joined host Joan Lunden to talk about her new book, Angels Don't Die: My Father's Gift of Faith. Davis showed aspiring self-promoters how almost any question -- -even those about a dying parent -- -can be turned into a plug…
With Pete Wilson's departure from the presidential race, we thought you would like to know what professional political sage Wfiliam Schneider had to say on the subject of Wilson just days before the California governor's pullout. "Wilson has always had a special genius for positioning. That's…
Stephanie Gutmann's spirited defense of Mel Gibson's penchant for using homosexual characters as comic relief, or, la Braveheart, signifiers of weakness and villainy, was unworthy of your magazine. ("Mel Gibson, One of Us, " Sept. 25.)
NEWT GINGRICH TOOK THE STAGE at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., this sum- mer to face one of the toughest audiences of his political life: a thousand or so District residents upset about Republican plans to cut the city's budget. The Speaker was there to convince the assembled that the new…
After Ruth Shalit's recent 13,000-word New Republic article, "The Washington Post: In Black and White," about affrmative action at the Post, several fiercely independent writers popped up to discuss the piece -- which meant attacking Ruth Shalit. First the Post's Howie Kurtz weighed in, then the…
Two weeks ago, we asked readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD if they could guess the name of the book we inadvertently left off our first Reading List. It was the fourth novel on a list of great works about money (the other three were The Titan and The Financier, both by Theodore Dreiser, and Framley…
In honor of Ross Perot's return to the presidential stage, here are three works by three authors that remind us, for some reason, of the $ 3 billion man:
The way the media tells it, Republicans on Capitol Hill are producing more change than the public wants. Or as Vice President A1 Gore explains, everything Newt and Company are doing is "extremist." We asked pollsters Fred Steeper and Steve Lombardo of Market Strategies to check on this. So in late…
Speaking of the New Republic, its most recent issue expresses concern that because Rupert Murdoch has business dealings with China, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will pull its punches with respect to that regime: "We'll be watching for the STANDARD'S hard-hitting attacks on the Communist tyrants in…
When the KKK took their travelling show to the little Wisconsin town of Elkhorn, the hooded ones got their oxes gored in the process. Seems the county board was all set to offcially denounce the Klansmen by passing a resolution denouncing "hate groups" when an alert citizen decried using the word…
Bob Dole's efforts to appeal to conservatives are gaining momentum, as this schedule of Dole's activities this week, purloined from Dole for President headquarters, proves:
What, do you suppose, is it like to work for a presidential campaign that is going absolutely nowhere? A clue could be found on fax machines across Washington on Sept. 6, when the Lugar for President campaign sent out a press release so bizarre that it cries out for comment and explication. It…
When Newt Gingrich innocently proposed to revive orphanages, the media, the Clintohs, and the children's lobby went honkers. A primitive idea, they insisted. Maybe not, said sociologist Charles Murray, when you consider the alternatives. If you died, Murray asked, would you want your surviving…
Now that Cal Ripken has bested Lou Gehrig, the obvious question for the sabremetricians is: Who holds the record for "doing lunch" in Washington? Consensus has it that the late public-relations man Robert Gray set a 2, 1304unch total that may be impossible to beat. Rain or shine, Democratic or…
With the ascension to power of a college professor with a taste for reading lists, the staff of TIE WEEKIX STANDARD will be providing, on occasion, an utterly unscientific reading list of our own favorite books on subjects of interest in the news. First up: